You are right mostly about that, but there are other reasons to abolish them.

They make Perl 5 harder to learn, harder to write correctly, harder to read and contribute to its reputation as a language full of cruft.

The fact that they make it harder to translate Perl 5 to other languages is at first merely another symptom of the problem. But if Perl 5 doesn't want to be tied to the C world forever, and wants to explore other environment (JVM/dalvik-only mobile phones and browsers, just to name two appealing ones), the lack of portability that those features introduce becomes a problem on its own.